Barbara Hannigan is still entirely a conductor. With great movements she elegantly draws the sound from the Munich Philharmonic, forms the trills as temptations, lets the solo violin caper. With her, everything is breath, lightness, speed and atmosphere. But then, many in the audience have been waiting for this magical moment, she turns to the audience and announces, beaming and proudly singing, that only she has the key to this wild parade that follows. A parade in nine numbers, in which she faces the audience like a queen, sings everything by heart and conducts back to the musicians.
Barbara Hannigan is a phenomenal queen. Nothing is too difficult for her high and bright, agile soprano, capable of every shade, modernity is her domain. But no matter how complicated the music may be, it always turns it into a paradise through which it guides its increasingly astonished listeners with enthusiasm, sometimes with the pleasure of their understated acrobatics, then with smiles and secrets, jubilation and speed, pain and death wish. Barbara Hannigan can do all of that, she just doesn’t like sentimentality, arty whispers, meaning-hubbering.
She sings her way into the cycle “Les Illuminations” by Benjamin Britten, which sets a selection of Arthur Rimbaud’s visionary, cryptic prose poems to music. So far, nobody has been able to clear up their riddle, which has never diminished their fascination for readers and musicians. Barbara Hannigan and Rimbaud stretch her vocalises like ropes, garlands and gold chains through the room to make herself and all the listeners dance, she conjures up beauty, the hermaphrodite Pan, the paradise of storms, fauns, acrobats – and the audience cheers for her stormy to.
Barbara Hannigan garnished the Britten with a light “Spider’s Feast” by Albert Roussel, to which Maurice Ravel’s “Natural Stories” respond. The baritone Stéphane Degout dryly and subtly presents his private zoo of peacock, swan, cricket, kingfisher and guinea fowl, his voice immerses in the orchestral impressionism, leaps out jubilantly, is shimmering and shining. Lastly, Joseph Haydn, whom Hannigan loves because, like Ravel, Roussel, and Britten, he is a magician tinkerer, especially in the 104th symphony, which the brilliant Munich Philharmonic plays, like everything else that evening, in a good mood and animated, light and virtuoso. Bravissimi!